Security analysis of the photon lightweight cryptosystem in the wireless body area network

Abstract

With the advancement and deployment of wireless communication techniques, wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as a promising approach for e-healthcare that collects the data of vital body parameters and movements for sensing and communicating wearable or implantable healthful related information. In order to avoid any possible rancorous attacks and resource abuse, employing lightweight ciphers is most effective to implement encryption, decryption, message authentication and digital signature for security of WBAN. As a typical lightweight cryptosystem with an extended sponge function framework, the PHOTON family is flexible to provide security for the RFID and other highly-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose a differential fault analysis to break three flavors of the PHOTON family successfully. The mathematical analysis and simulating experimental results show that 33, 69 and 86 random faults in average are required to recover each message input for PHOTON-80 /20/16, PHOTON-160/36/36 and PHOTON-224/32/32, respectively. It is the first result of breaking PHOTON with the differential fault analysis. It provides a new reference for the security analysis of the same structure of the lightweight hash functions in the WBAN.